On Aug. 2, Galesburg special-education students were left waiting for transportation to their summer program.

The reason: Vagts had already laid off his bus drivers and Auxilio hadn't hired new workers. While some G-A drivers indicated in July they might be willing to work in August, there was no verbal or written agreement with any individuals to staff the bus routes after Aug. 1.

Yet when the issue of the stranded students came up at a board meeting, Vagts publicly blamed the bus drivers, suggesting they were expected to work that day and failed to show up
to protest privatization.

It's an anecdote that captures the competing narratives in the Galesburg-Augusta school district about Vagts' superintendency.

Vagts' supporters strongly argue that he's been willing to make the tough, unpopular decisions necessary to keep the district going, such as privatizing custodial and transportation services.

His detractors say he's implemented those changes in such a way that fuels distrust, such as unfairly blaming the bus drivers for his own misjudgement.

Tim Vagts

It's the detractors who have the upper hand now. Last month, the board voted 5-2 not to extend Vagts' contract beyond June 2014, and the plan right now is to begin the search for a new superintendent next spring.

"There's a lack of trust between the superintendent and the staff and
the community," interim Board Chairman Richard Fletcher said earlier this week. "The board, superintendent and administrators were all on the
same page, but it seemed nobody else wanted to be on that page."

The controversy has left the district's leadership in disarray. Board President Karen
Rutherford and Vice President Sandra Noteboom-Wood -- the two trustees who wanted to keep Vagts -- resigned after the board's March 18 vote.

That leaves the Galesburg board with five members, three of whom were newly elected in November and have served for less than six months. It appears likely the replacements for Rutherford and Noteboom-Wood also will be rookies.

"The people on the board are very smart," said Diane Doorlag, a Galesburg parent who regularly attends board meetings. "But it's a very, very young board and they're going to have a hard road."

What complicates matters considerably: The issues in Galesburg are much larger than those involving Vagts.

In fact, the current unrest is a familiar story in G-A.

Vagts is the district's sixth superintendents since 1998, and his immediate four predecessors all left under unpleasant circumstances -- two superintendents quit abruptly in the middle of the school year,
one tendered his resignation after he was told to look for another job
and one was an interim who was unsuccessful in his bid to gain the
permanent position.

Doorlag, who graduated from Galesburg-Augusta High School in the
early 1980s and now has a senior and an eighth-grader in the school
system, said there has been conflict between school administration and Galesburg residents for as long as she can remember.

"It's been like this since I was in school," Doorlag said. "People don't like this superintendent because he's too strict and they don't like that superintendent because he's not strict enough."

Part of the problem, say Doorlag and others, is that Galesburg is a small, tight-knit community that takes enormous pride in its school system but also views change with great skepticism.

"We have a lot of older people here who want to the school system to be the way that it was, and they see no reason to change things," Doorlag said.

Many residents don't understand the nuances of
school funding or new academic standards that require Michigan schools
to adapt or die, she said.

"People think things should be a certain way, and it often can't be," Doorlag said. "I don't know how getting a new superintendent will solve that problem."Issues with Vagts

Yet Doorlag also is critical of Vagts, saying that he has undermined his leadership by not treating people with respect, and by not being candid and truthful when confronted with controversy -- such as when he blamed the bus drivers.

"I don't think he thinks of it as lying," Doorlag said. "He says what he figures he needs to say to defuse a situation. .... He tells people what they want to hear and if the story is different later, than the story is different later."

Another example comes from a lawsuit filed by Vagts' former assistant, Carolyn Meyers.

When Vagts came to the district in July 2009, he allegedly told Meyers that she was not entitled to overtime pay or compensatory time -- an apparent violation of federal labor laws.

Meyers ended up leaving her job and promptly filed a wrongful discharge suit, which she settled for more than $60,000 in 2011.

But last summer, Vagts denied knowledge of the lawsuit settlement when it was referenced in a proposed board recall petition.

The petition said the Galesburg board paid $25,000 to settle a lawsuit involving Vagts on the same night that his contract was renewed. "I absolutely don't know where that came from," Vagts told a Kalamazoo Gazette reporter about the allegation.

A few days later, confronted with March 2011 board minutes that showed those events occurred, Vagts professed confusion. He also said the settlement cost "was covered by our insurance."

That wasn't true either: The board's deductible was $28,500 and it was paid from its operating fund. The total cost of the settlement was
"between $60,000 to $70,000," Vagts acknowledged in a later
conversation.

His
current base salary is $103,819 and his total compensation package was worth
$173,662 in 2011-12, which includes insurance benefits worth $11,834 and an annuity of $8,565, plus $38,040 paid by the district for its mandatory contributions to Social Security
and the state retirement fund.

Vagts also received a $5,500 longevity bonus at the end of 2010-11 and again in 2011-12, which he acknowledged at a board meeting last October when asked by a resident if he was receiving any money beyond his base salary.

What Vagts didn't mention: The longevity bonus for this school year is $11,000 and he gets another $11,000 at the end of 2013-14.

Moreover, in addition to holidays, sick time and personal days, Vagts' contract grants him seven weeks of vacation and allows him to cash-out three of those weeks, which he has done each year, yielding another $5,575.

Among Kalamazoo County superintendents, Vagts has a compensation package that ranks seventh out of nine: Superintendents in Kalamazoo, Portage, Gull Lake, Parchment, Schoolcraft and Vicksburg are paid more and those in Comstock and Climax-Scotts are paid less.

Eric Curtiss, president of the Galesburg-Augusta Education Association, said that district staff and residents expect their leaders to be "open and honest," and there were times that Vagts has fallen short of that.

"There were these, what I would call disconnects," where people felt that Vagts wasn't telling them the whole story or he wasn't owning up to mistakes, Curtiss said.

"It really turned people off to Mr. Vagts and his leadership," Curtiss said. "Just be honest.

"Galesburg-Augusta has a very unique personality, but I think it's a
good personality," Curtiss said. "They don't want people pulling the
wool over their eyes. They want to be respected."

In November, the 73 members of the GAEA approved a "no confidence" vote against Vagts, and they reaffirmed that resolution in a vote in early March, Curtiss said.

Curtiss attributes the vote to "trust issues." Heightening tensions is the fact that teachers are still without a contract for this school year.

Doorlag said that the board did the right thing in declining to renew Vagts' contract, because he had burned too many bridges.

"He's wronged people in certain ways and they're not going to get over it," she said. "We've got to make this work, and we can't make it work with him."

Vagts' supporters

Vagts' supporters paint a much different picture.

They talk about a dysfunctional community with a hard-to-please constituency focused more on the needs of adults than students and a union that makes unrealistic demands and creates a "toxic" environment.

They also say that Vagts, a former elementary school principal in Charlotte, was put in an impossible situation. When he came to Galesburg-Augusta, he was a first-time superintendent in a district under severe fiscal stress and facing demands by the state to raise academic standards and outcomes.

Moreover, as superintendent in a small district with less than 1,200 students, Vagts has had to wear many hats: There are no assistant superintendents overseeing budgets or curriculum, which means he is the point person on every major decision.

"Tim did good work," said Ron Fuller, superintendent of the Kalamazoo Regional Educational Service Agency. "He was just a victim of circumstances. ... It's a product of the state of Michigan and its defunding of education. It's an ugly time.

"You had a superintendent who came and had to save money and had to make decisions that cost him his job," Fuller said.

Those controversial decisions included closing Augusta Intermediate School, which infuriated some Augusta residents who insisted that the merger of the Galesburg and Augusta school systems decades ago came with a promise that the district would always operate two buildings in Galesburg and two in Augusta.

There also is the decision to privatize custodians and bus drivers. "That was very difficult because you're laying off people who live in the community," Curtiss said.

Fuller said that Vagts opted to do what was best for students versus what was the more politically expedient.

"He wants the maximum dollars going to instruction," Fuller said, adding about the school closure: "A district the size of Galesburg can't afford to run that many buildings."

Galesburg school board members also praise Vagts for raising academic standards at the same time he has having to cut budgets.

They say he introduced professional
learning communities, a strategy to promote more collaboration among
teachers to strengthen instruction, as well as new strategies to identify and address student behavior problems.

"Some things that Tim introduced, like professional learning communities, definitely have been beneficial," Curtiss said.

Fletcher and Trustee Lynne Wells both say much of the criticism directed at Vagts really should be directed to the board.

"I strongly put blame on me and the rest of the board," said Richard
Fletcher, interim board president. "(Vagts) did exactly what he needed
to do, and we didn't give him the proper network of support."

For instance, a major sore point in the community is a $11 million bond request put on the May 2012 ballot, which would have funded expanding the high school into a junior/senior high. Yet a community survey in fall 2010 showed widespread opposition to the plan, and the bond
request was defeated by a 2-1 margin.

Both Fletcher and Wells now say the board put the issue on the ballot against the advice of Vagts, who told them to pay attention to the survey.

"But we were so certain that the survey was
wrong," Wells said.

Fletcher said the board also was probably too aggressive in trying to stifle criticism of Vagts, creating a backlash among some residents.

"We circled the wagons and said, 'Don't question him,' " Fletcher said. But in protecting him, "we made his job much harder."

Curtiss said that's an accurate perception.

"When Richard Fletcher said the board circled the wagons, that was true," Curtiss said. "We've absolutely felt that way."

Vagts attributes the tensions in the district to community residents
"grieving all the loss, all the changes that are taking place," such as
closing the school in Augusta and the job cutbacks in the district.

"People are angry," he said. "They are depressed. They feel they are losing control."

If he had to do anything differently in the past four years, he said, "I'd do things slower," especially the privatization of jobs and the closing of the school.

But, he added, "closing the school has saved us $1 million to date. Privatizating transportation is saving us $100,000" this year.

If the budget cuts hadn't occurred, Vagts said, the district would have
gone into deficit, making G-A a target for a state takeover.

A general point of agreement now is that the Galesburg-Augusta community needs
to come together and decide on their priorities.

"The board needs to keeps its emphasis on student performance," said James Rayner, who was Galesburg superintendent from 1999 to 2003. "If I were on that board, I'd be doing a lot of listening, although I'd be selective in the weight that I'd give to what I heard."

Rayner, who was forced out of his Galesburg post because of conflicts with his management style, went onto to become superintendent in Ironwood in the Upper Peninsula for nine years and is now retired.

He said that in reading the coverage on the Galesburg situation, "my overwhelming thought is not what is being said, but what is not being said. You're not hearing much about how kids in Galesburg-Augusta are actually doing."

"My concern is for the kids and that time spent on (the superintendent controversy) generates a lot of heat, but not a lot of light," he said. "My concern is that the board is just going to get buried by grumblers and complainers."

Rayner suggested that the union's complaints should be taken with a grain of salt. "Every time the union doesn't get what it wants, it's 'trust issues,' " he said.

He also raised the question that others are asking: Considering Galesburg's problematic track record with superintendents, who's going want the job? And what are the chances that a new superintendent will be an improvement over Vagts?

Because Galesburg is a small district with relatively low pay, Rayner said, the reality is the board likely will hire a first-time superintendent who may or may not have the skill set to be a strong financial and academic leader in a district where the superintendent has minimal support staff.

"It's a very steep learning curve," Rayner said, and it's also a concern that the new superintendent will have such an inexperienced board.

Doorlag also is worried about the district's future.

"I love this place," she said. "It's in my blood."

But,
she said, she fears that if the collective school community doesn't get
its act together, "we could lose Galesburg-Augusta."

Curtiss doesn't see it that way, and he says he's optimistic.

"We're a really good district," he said. "Our teachers put their heart and soul into their jobs. The staff here is really dedicated.

"We have a good foundation with the professional learning communities and the new behavior interventions, so we're on a really good path and I don't see that changing," Curtiss said.